CMintS

In mid 2017 I was searching for an Static Site Generator(SSG) that would work perfectly both for my single and multi-language websites, but I was surprised not being able to find one that wouldn't require me adding bunch of 3-rd party plugins, do a lot of customization work and have a scalable i18n implementation.

Today I'm happy to announce release of the CMintS! CMS and Static Site Generator Which is also powering current blog.

What is CMintS?

CMintS is a CMS and Static Site Generator for single and multi-language websites creation. Learn more about CMintS at https://cmints.io/. It's an open source project and every related repository can be found in the CMintS GitHub organization.

You can either install CMintS globally as it's described in the installation documentation or as a local dependency by following the quick start tutorial.

Single and multi-language website starters can be found at https://single.cmints.io/ and https://multi.cmints.io/ accordingly.

Project Structure

Structure of the CMintS is quite straightforward:

├── public
├── locales
├── pages
├── theme
└── config.js

• /locales - folder contains translations of the multi-language website project.
• /public - stores all your static content, images, CSS and etc.
• /pages - here goes your website page contents.
• /theme - theme of the website.
• config.js - used for overwriting various website default configurations, generation options and minification setup.

Theme

theme
├── layouts
│   ├── partials
│   │   ├── footer.ejs
│   │   └── header.ejs  
│   ├── default.ejs
│   └── home.ejs
├── less
│   ├── _footer.less
│   ├── _header.less
│   ├── index.less
│   └── main.less
└── js
    ├── _contextMenu.js
    └── main.js

• /theme/layout - CMintS is using EJS as a templating engine for creating layouts. EJS is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup while writing plain JavaScript.
• /theme/less - .less files are being processed into the public/css directory, only filenames starting with "_" are not compiled into the target directory, but yet they can be used by other less files. You can also setup processing options and minification in the config.js.
• /theme/js - CMintS is using Node.js-style modules and makes Theme functionality implementation modular out of the box. JavaScript files that are placed in theme/js directory and don't have starting _ in the filename are being compiled into the public/js directory. You can also setup compilation options and minification in the config.js

Pages

pages
├── about
│   └── team.md
├── about.md
├── documentation
│   ├── getting-started
│   │   ├── configuration.md
│   │   ├── index.md
│   │   └── _structure.md
│   └── i18n
│       ├── index.md
│       └── markdown.md
├── index.ejs
└── news.md

The folder structure inside of the pages directory reflects actual URL path when the page is requested(unless a permalink is specified).

Front Matter can be used for pages metadata specification:

---
title: Front Matter
description: Front Matter is a powerful tool for adding metadata to the pages
categories: [documentation, i18n]
showToc: true
---

Here are page types suported by CMintS:

• Markdown(.md)
• HTML(.html)
• EJS(.ejs)

i18n

locales
├── de
│   ├── header.json
│   └── news.json
├── en
│   ├── header.json
│   └── news.json
└── ru
    ├── about
    │   └── teams.json
    ├── header.json
    ├── index.json
    └── news.json

Locale files hold list of the translations strings, the translation strings consist of stringid, message and an optional description.

{
  "heading-main": {
    "description": "Heading of the main page",
    "message": "Заголовок"
  }
}

Source language strings can be defined in pages or theme layouts by placing them inside of opening and closing curly braces containing stringId, optional description and actual text:

{stringId[Description] Source text}

Or by defining stringId and locale file path:

{stringId(path)}

Learn more about i18n here